Visual Studio Installer
Microsoft has done a great job by slimming down the installation process by giving complete control to the user to choose what he/she wants in VS2017. The screen looks as shown below when you download the installer and run it for the first time.
You have to select the tick boxes on which templates you want to add in your Visual Studio, however you will be able to modify this later, i.e. you can add more or remove the existing templates. How cool is that?
Search
Second, the search process has become even easier, as you don't have to search the entire solution (Control + Shift + F) anymore to find a mehtod or a property. You can do it at your finger tips by navigating to the path shown in the screens given below. Additionally when you click on each search result; the relevant class method in the search result will open up for you. I am sure that this will increase the productivity, as it avoids wasting the developer's valueble time in searching.
Live Unit Testing
This is the one which makes it worth having VS2017 in your machine. Most developers don't spend enough time in writing Unit tests because of their tight deadlines or not knowing the importance, but it's absolutely worth doing and you will realize it only when the project size gets big. Keeping this in mind, Microsoft has introduced a Live Unit testing feature, which will help in reducing the stress of creating Unit tests. The prerequisites to use this feature are to create a test project in your solution and give references of MSTEST.FRAMEWORK and MSTEST.ADAPTER. You can install both of them from NuGet Package Manager console. Just make sure that you select Test project when installing.
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Once you have gotten everything ready, you need to start Live Unit testing. See the screen given below.
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When it starts, you can observe the dash symbols at the begining of each method in your classes. Now, the fun starts, as you right click on the method; you want to test and you can see the option; Create Unit Test. A pop up Window appears when selecting the option. Fill up all the relevant info and click OK. You can see the Test skeleton will be created for you in your test project and you just need to write the main logic for your test and nothing else.
As it's live Unit testing, you don't need to run the individual or All tests. You can see if the tests are successful or unsuccessful in live Unit testing, so the result will be automatically updated when you are writing the test logic. These results can be represented by Red Cross and Green Right symbols at the left side of your unit tests.
Find all references
The results of the refereces; which you want to find for a method, are displayed in a hierarchical manner (Class> Method, property etc) now. The best part in here is you see the relevant code of each search results on hover.
Finally, you can find the execution time in microseconds of a method too. Many more features have been added in this version to support Mobile development (Cordova, Ionic) and Cloud solutions. It's not possible to include all the features in a single post. Please have a look at MSDN for the complete list of features, which Microsoft came up with VS2017.
Hope, you enjoyed reading my post !!